Category Archives: Crime and Justice

I recently wrote about why the 1990s was such an amazing time to be a young woman. Jodie Foster confirmed the sense of a breakthrough at a screening of The Silence of The Lambs on Friday night at the BFI … Continue reading →

You never forget your first time. I was 19 years old. I descended into a dark, cramped basement where student actors brought to life a weird, twisted sexual triangle. Going to student drama productions in odd spaces around the University … Continue reading →

‘How did you get into first class? You don’t deserve to be in first class. ‘You should be in common class. In fact, you shouldn’t be in this country at all. ‘You don’t deserve to be here. Bloody foreigners. Where … Continue reading →

Three ageing rockers are holding up big glasses of milk in a toast. There’s always something poignant about seeing how teen stars have aged, but the Bay City Rollers really were angelic faced teeny boppers, and I am stung by … Continue reading →

It was late, I was tired and I needed cheering up and I found this great comedy on TV that I’d never seen before which did just the job. Burke and Hare, directed by John Landis in 2010 and starring … Continue reading →

I’ve reported on violent crime for 25 years including the OJ Simpson case. I consider it a privilege to cover trials. Strip away the glamour of celebrity and a very large proportion, such as the OJ Simpson case, are about … Continue reading →

I suppose it’s good to still get agitated about stories I cover. But the amount of political capital that politicans have tried to make out of the Rotherham child sexual grooming scandal left me all the more appalled when … Continue reading →

This piece first appeared in The Big Issue magazine – journalism worth paying for. Available from street vendors UK wide or subscription. Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford has 3 and a half miles of books. It’s a wonderful place. The deputy … Continue reading →

I ate my first Passover Seder meal recently, as a guest of Rabbi Jonathan Romain at his synagogue. I had had the ingredients and their symbolic meaning on the seder table memorized since that sheet Miss Thick gave me to … Continue reading →

When the Space Shuttle programme was grounded I wrote this big newspaper feature about how it left a generation, reared on the promise of deep space exploration, on the gantry of broken dreams. It was rather fine, I thought, and … Continue reading →